


Demolition Woman

by englishable



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, Thor (Movies)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-20
Updated: 2019-06-20
Packaged: 2020-05-15 02:40:20
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,058
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19286431
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/englishable/pseuds/englishable
Summary: Of all the ways and places Sif could have reunited with Thor, a barroom-brawl-turned-street-fight on Contraxia certainly isn't one of them.Luckily, Thor would know that knockout right hook anywhere.





	Demolition Woman

**Author's Note:**

> Not quite in the same continuity as my other Thor/Sif pieces, but knowing these two it would probably be more canonically feasible.

…

Fighting, in Sif’s experience, is much like dancing or singing or anything else that prompts warriors and lovers alike to make utter fools of themselves; it can sweep you up into its spirit and then you do not much care what your own personal stock is in the matter, if indeed you have any personal stock at all.

(There were more than a few tabletops in the vanished halls of Asgard that bore the scuff-marks of her boots and Sif knows every note to that mortal song about the hero Villeman and his fair Magnhild, even the notes too high for her to hit.)  

She is on Contraxia – which is just as much not-home as anywhere else, so its name makes little difference – and only comes into the bar because there is a real iron wood-stove at which to warm her hands. The drink, a glass of something red-gold like brandy, is her price for admission, although the shield she wears strapped to her back usually guards against unnecessary questions. She sips the glass half-empty and tosses the rest onto the stove’s glowing coals. 

It is a long, long way to Earth, she thinks, but perhaps she should go back again, except last time she found only a small village by the sea and the woman with the winged tattoo on her arm. She might look for Thor next on Xandar, or on Hala, or on some place called Sakaar at the center of a hundred forking paths through space, or else on some other foreign planet where she is just as likely be the only member of her race. Everywhere it will be the same. 

She puts her head in her thinned hands – she cropped her hair nearly down to the scalp two weeks ago and with the hollowed cheeks Sif supposes she looks like a half-grown boy – and stays this way. It still feels as though there are pieces out of order within her, which gives her  cause to wonder whether or not the Infinity Stones really put her all-the-way back together from out of the dust.  

A dozen languages float through the smoky air and Sif is not listening to any of them when the argument starts. It is something to do with an outstanding gambling debt or the missing half of a sandwich, depending how one translates several verbs.

Somebody throws a punch, a chair, a table and another barroom patron, in that order, the fight evolving into a tangle of limbs, and Sif is picking up her stool to move out of the way when a Kree man shatters his long-necked bottle against her shield.

Sif wings around with the stool to wallop him, sighs, and sails into the crowd with both fists.

She certainly has nothing better to do. 

The fight bursts through the front door into the street, turning the snow to mud and slush. Crowds charge towards the melee like children to a summer watering hole and Sif supposes this is also what draws in the man with the dual knives and the red heritage markings, along with a walking tree and a foul-mouthed little rabbit.

They are none of her concern, though. Sif jacks her knee into the soft place under someone’s ribs and somersaults someone else over her shoulder. The press of people crushes her so that she does not see the huge, thickset and wild-haired blond man with the plaited beard until she crashes straight into him.

Both of them stagger. The man regains his footing first. 

“Hello,” he says; someone fires a pistol into the air and she only half-hears him through the noise. “Careful there, boy. You shouldn’t be - ”

She lunges at him.

He gets two handfuls of her shirt and reels his head back as though readying to knock their skulls together. Sif doubles her left arm and snaps her elbow around into his face; when he lets go she hits him with a right hook so hard it cracks his nose and drops him like a stunned bull into the mud.

He sweeps his leg and knocks her off her feet. The man is far quicker than that heavy gut suggests, which flits Sif’s mind to Volstagg for one sharp moment, but by then they have each risen to their feet again and so Sif takes a running leap.

It is not a tactic she learned on Asgard, principally because all her close-quarter combat teachers there were larger men who had no need of it. Sif borrowed it instead from the agents of SHIELD and it puts her legs astride the man’s massive shoulders so that she can wheel around to hurl him down beneath her, although it ends with his throat pinned between her thighs and with the man staring dazedly up into her face.

He is panting for breath. His nose burbles blood into his beard and there are snowflakes caught in his hay-colored hair. His left eye is clear blue – the right eye is brown – and he stares at her harder, just a little. Something changes in his face like light passing through a prism. 

“W – ” he starts; he swallows “—Sif?”

Sif sits back on his chest to look at him properly. 

He smiles as she does, red rising between his teeth from a split lip, and Sif thumps her hands over his shoulders and arms in the way she once did when patting him down for unseen wounds. 

Well. He seems real enough, anyway.  

“Thor?”

“For better or worse –  oh, hang on.” He snatches her close against himself and rolls them both onto their sides just as a pair of combatants go tripping over them; the motion brings his voice flush against her ear. “Shall we explain ourselves to one another, or would you rather we finished this fight first?”

(The fighting has spilled into the alleyways and so nobody takes notice of the man and woman who appear to be either embracing or suffocating one another there in the snow; after all, there is no telling what foolish people will do when the spirit of a moment takes hold of them. 

“I’m so sorry,” Sif tells him, later, tapping gingerly at the bruise on his nose. “How does it feel?”

“It hurts like hell.” He smiles again. “It’s the best thing I’ve felt in a good long while.”)

…


End file.
